The Compositing Power of HDTV
In contrast to film and video, the new HDTV medium has an enormous capacity for increasing the compositing power both of images and of international markets. With its digital picture and sound and its video luminance of 1,920 pixels per line, HDTV can composite up to twenty-seven generations without significant loss of resolution. Undoubtedly, it has the potential to enhance the clarity, realism, and involvement of any visual/auditory representation. Yet what has seemed most compelling, at least during the first five years of application, is its capacity for surrealism and special effects—that is, its ability to make obvious simulations look "realistic." This paradox may be explained by the extraordinary technical compositing power of the medium; or by the postmodernist cultural context in which this new technology is being developed; or by the current popularity of music videos, which have appropriated and commercialized the surrealist aesthetic; or by the economic consideration that special effects is the only area where the medium is presently commercially competitive—or by a combination of all these factors. Such use has not been restricted to music videos and commercials, but has also occurred in the feature film Julia and Julia and in sequences from big-budget movies like Back to the Future, The Abyss , and The Hunt for Red October . Despite its poor showing at the box office, Kurosawa's American-financed Dreams (1990) made one of the most visionary uses of this new technology to date, particularly in the episode (shot in Sony HDTV and later transferred to film) where the dreamer enters the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (played by Martin Scorsese). The sequence creates a
stunning "composite" vision of Japanese/European/Italian-American artistry in the combined visual media of dream/painting/cinema/HDTV—a highbrow analogue to the kind of pop fluid assimilations we found in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles .
The "compositing" power of HDTV is especially controversial in the economic sphere. With three different standards of television signals currently in operation (NTSC, the technically inferior system used by North America and Japan for broadcasting to over 40 percent of the world's TV sets; PAL, used in Australia and most of Western Europe; and SECAM, used in France, Eastern Europe, and the USSR), many feel that the choice of a new standard for HDTV represents "an opportunity to establish a . . . compatible standard for universal international signals . . . that would streamline signal transmission and interpretation."[12] Europe, however, is doggedly resisting such global unification in order to retard the expansion of Hollywood software (whether controlled economically by the United States or Japan) in European markets, which are rapidly being restructured into a new economic supersystem that will be larger than Japan and the United States combined.
The current shakiness of U.S. domination over global mass media is nowhere more apparent than in the plans for HDTV, which is already being used for some regular broadcasts in Japan and which promises eventually to affect the whole superentertainment system—movies, electronic cinema, terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, video software (including video games), databases, and other scientific and educational uses of video. Robert Epstein reports:
Last week Sony introduced three HD products for sale in Japan only: a 36-inch commercial HD monitor, a commercial HD decoder and a $17,000, 36-inch-wide televi-
sion set capable of HD pictures once a consumer decoder is implanted in it. . . . Now [Sony] and other consumer product manufacturers are getting ready to sell HD sets, once the FCC next year and the rest of the world two years later agree on how many lines make for high definition. What follows will be HD video recorders, players and cameras.[13]
The Japanese television network NHK is also doing HD production in New York (at the Kaufman Astoria Studios) and Los Angeles (at KSCI), and is sponsoring workshops on HDTV and experimental productions in some of America's leading film schools, including the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Yet America's role in this new technology is still quite indefinite. As Dutka and Easton report, "While the HDTV debate continues in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission is going forward with a testing program and says it will adopt an American HDTV standard in 1993, creating in all probability, three different standards worldwide—ours, Japan's and Europe's."[14] Despite such reassurances, A. G. Hawn warns that the United States still lags far behind:
With the European and Japanese investment in R&D already exceeding $1 billion and the yearly market projected at $20 billion by the mid 1990s, it becomes increasingly important that some major decisions be made as to the role of the United States in the marketplace. . . . But while the Japanese will have a system on-line sometime early this year and the Europeans are expecting to be in operation by 1992, the United States has made little progress toward the development of a signal standard or distribution program that would enable the consumer to utilize the system."[15]